Honor 90 5G First Impressions: A New Beginning

HonorTech or HTech has launched a new smartphone in India called the Honor 90 5G, thus reviving the brand name here after a long hiatus. This smartphone sits in the sub-Rs 40,000 category. Some recent models from Realme, Motorola and OnePlus have also upped the competition in this segment. We received the Honor 90 5G in this emerald green colour, this is my first impressions about the phone.

The Honor 90 5G does not focus on any one specific area but instead, the company has tried to fit in all the popular specs. A 6.7-inch AMOLED curved-edge floating display, premium design, 200-megapixel main rear camera, and 50-megapixel front camera are just some of the highlights of this smartphone.

The back of the phone is made of glass, and it has a polycarbonate frame. All the rear sensors have been fitted in two separate camera bumps that look like rings. There is shiny trim around the bump. The remaining part of the panel has dotted patterns, which shine in the light and also offer good grip. These dotted patterns protect the phone from fingerprints to a great extent. 

The frame of Honor 90 5G is glossy. The power button and volume rocker are on the right side of the phone. At the bottom, there is a SIM tray, USB Type-C port, and a single speaker grill. One microphone port is on the top while the other is at the bottom. Honor 90 5G has a curved-edge display with thin bezels all around the panel. The bottom bezel is a little thicker than the rest.

There is a notch in the top-center of the display, in which the selfie camera is fitted. The thickness of the phone is only 7.8mm and weight is 183g. The design of Honor 90 5G is quite attractive and would be easily identifiable even in a crowd of smartphones.

The Honor 90 5G’s display has a 120Hz refresh rate. This is an AMOLED panel which has a resolution of 2664×1200 pixels. The peak HDR brightness of the phone is rated at 1,600 nits. It is HDR10+ certified and HDR certified for Netflix. HonorTech has said that 3,840Hz PWM display dimming technology has been used in its smartphone. The display is quite impressed as content looks crisp and vivid. The colors also appear punchy, both indoors and outdoors. 

The Honor 90 5G uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 processor. There are select smartphones available with this processor in the Indian market, one of which is the Motorola Razr 40. This SoC is built on a 4nm process, which is considered good. This processor supports 14 5G bands. Despite using it for a short period of time, I found this processor to be powerful.

My review unit came with 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of storage. In this configuration, the phone handled social media browsing, content streaming and short-term gaming well. We will put this smartphone through all our tests, so stay tuned for the full review. To prevent the phone from overheating during heavy use, HonorTech says it has used graphite sheet and AI-based thermal management system in the Honor 90 5G.

Honor 90 5G has a main 200-megapixels rear camera. Apart from that, there is a 12-megapixel ultra-wide and macro camera, and a third depth camera. The main rear camera has a 1/1.4-inch sensor. The ultra-wide camera has a field of view (FOV) of 112 degrees. The camera app has options for various modes like HDR, portrait, multi-video, solo cut, close up. The main rear camera can record videos at 4K 30fps, while the 50-megapixel front camera can also record videos at 4K 30fps.

Digital zoom up to 10X is available with the main rear camera. The initial pictures which I shot looked fine. The selfie camera appears more effective, but we will talk about camera performance in detail in the review.

The Honor 90 5G has a 5,000mAh battery, but the charger does not come in the box. There is only a USB Type-A to Type-C cable. The phone’s battery lasted for about a day during initial use.

The Honor 90 5G smartphone runs on Magic OS 7.1 based on Android 13. Some preloaded apps were present in the phone, which could be uninstalled. Talking about other features, it comes with RAM Turbo through which the phone’s RAM can be expanded virtually up to 5GB. This phone also features NFC, an in-display fingerprint sensor, and UFS 3.1 storage. The company is promising two years of software and three years of security updates.

We will put the Honor 90 5G smartphone through all the necessary tests in the coming days, so stay connected for the full review.